“... them. As he hadn’t there was something sinful about music lessons.’ Much of the early part of Anne Sebba’s new biography concerns Ethel’s love of Yiddish theatre and her own theatrical ambitions. She was named ‘class actress’ in a high school that produced Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz), Zero Mostel and ...”

“... Menocchio extracted the view that there were good men in all religions: but ‘since I was born a Christian I want to remain a Christian, and if I had been born a Turk I would want to live like a Turk.’ From the rather surprising source of Boccaccio’s Decameron Menocchio drew the conclusion that ‘each person ...”

“... The last occasion on which the crown refused its assent to legislation had been in 1708 when Queen Anne rejected the Scottish Militia Bill. Without a veto, monarchy was a cipher, and could not claim co-ordinate authority with the other branches – Lords and Commons – of a notionally tripartite constitution. However, under the convenient veil of a notional ...”

“... anxious about recent flood warnings, and down in Portsmouth to buy a new yacht. As a Pompey girl, born and bred next to the football ground in Fratton, I naturally know nothing at all about sailing (though I know that ‘F’ stands for frigate and chanted ‘Boney was a warrior, rah, rah, rah!’ in the playground, assuming it referred to a skeleton). I nod ...”

“... the infant’s breath fatally to escape its body, puff by puff. Lucia was defiant. ‘It was not [born] alive, and I will never be able to say why it was not, and I cannot do anything about this, I cannot supersede the one who is the master of the whole world: it pleased God that it was born dead, and I don’t know what to ...”

“... Scotland and England which her son James VI and I would attempt and her great-great-granddaughter Anne (assisted by that parcel of rogues) would finally achieve. If the 16-year-old Mary hadn’t prematurely tried to invent the United Kingdom by having herself proclaimed in Paris as rightful ‘Queen of Scotland, England and Ireland’ within days of ...”

“... drawing and pastel lessons from her father, the society portraitist Louis Vigée; her contemporary Anne-Rosalie Bocquet, who died on the guillotine during the Terror, studied at a drawing school run by her mother. In later decades, however, progressively smaller numbers of Parisian female exhibitors came from artistic households. The majority received ...”

“... own big sister, 16 years her senior and already pregnant and off to Glasgow when Janice is barely born; only to flounce back home to Saltcoats, ‘clawed . . . free from motherhood and sprung like a steel trap’ in 1960, when Janice is nearly five. There are good things about having such a sister, especially when she gets a job in an Italian ice-cream ...”

“... just as resentment against British rule was reaching the point of explosion. Flora MacDonald was born exactly three hundred years ago and was 24 when Bonnie Prince Charlie lurched into her life. The new biography by Flora Fraser (who is named after her subject) intends to sift out a ‘real Flora’ from the spoil heap of sentimental legend. That means ...”

“... in the more common contemporary spelling, the one he used in his only extant signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of ...”

“... than late Georgian villas but more modest than the old landed estates. These were homes born of the railway age, the age of the commuter and the weekend house party and they had acquired, by the 1890s, an idiom of their own. ‘Old English’ and ‘Queen Anne’ were the suggestive descriptions applied to ...”

“... a timber manager, respected in the trade, a man of probity, quiet and undemonstrative. His mother, Anne-Marie, worried constantly, and often took to her bed. Jean-Claude learned to ‘mislead’ her so as not to make her worry even more. Purely emotional distress was considered a caprice in the family, whose motto ran: a Romand tells the truth and shames the ...”

“... in New York was at St Vincent Ferrer, I think – on 66th and Lexington. And we weren’t invited. Anne and I weren’t even told where it was.   As I went in I saw Daphne Hellman with a black hat on. It was such an awful service. Everybody was looking round to see who was there and hobnobbing. I was too. On Mallorca Tony and Barbara both seem to have ...”

“... of the same unspoken narcissism about Marya Hornbacher’s uneven new book, Wasted. Hornbacher was born in California in 1974, a year after the first articles about anorexia, the ‘slimming disease’, began to appear in the mainstream American press. At the age of nine, she became bulimic; at 15, she switched to anorexia, and spent the next several years in ...”

“... Gibbons, which he sometimes wore to answer the door, and a clock that Henry VIII had given to Anne Boleyn. His house was open to visitors if they applied for tickets and Walpole would show them round himself. What it all meant, however, was less easy to see. ‘Horrie’ was described by one of his many detractors as a man who wore ‘mask within ...”